Cost-Effective Path Planning for Submarine Cable Network Extension

Abstract

We describe a cost-effective approach to path planning for submarine cables connecting a given site to an existing cable network on the Earth's surface. The objective is to minimize the overall life-cycle cost of submarine cables by considering multiple design considerations. With the surface terrain represented by a triangulated manifold, we formulate the problem as one of the variational optimization framed in terms of an Eikonal equation and solved by leveraging the fast marching method. The results based on real-world three-dimensional data are presented to illustrate the performance of this approach in the submarine cable network extension.